You can make the kernel reboot automatically instead of halting (the default behavoir) if/when the kernel panics.

You can set this by sending a message to /proc (as root):

echo 5 >/proc/sys/kernel/panic

The value given is seconds to wait before rebooting. The default setting is 0, which doesn't cause a reboot.

To check the current settings:

cat /proc/sys/kernel/panic

You can also add:

kernel.panic=5

to the file /etc/sysctl.conf

It's also possible to do this by adding panic=5 to the boot-loader command-line. This is good in the few rare cases (suck as boot with a bad initrd) where the kernel can panic before reading /etc/sysctrl.conf.